(JWR) ---- (http://www.jewishworldreview.com)
THE EFFORTS TO EXTRACT a message from the Littleton, Colorado
tragedy continue unabated. It couldn't be long before gender politics were
dragged into the fray.

There have been a few attempts to blame teenagers' troubles on
working mothers (though the lead partner in the crime, Eric Harris, had a
stay-at-home mother for many years). Mostly, however, the gender analysis
has focused on how we raise boys.

Some commentators even complain that the gender angle has gotten
short shrift. In the Boston Globe, Jackson Katz and Sut Jhally gripe that
headlines focus on "kids killing kids" and youth in crisis, when it's a
question of "boys killing boys and boys killing girls" and masculinity in
crisis. Katz and Jhally speculate that if such a massacre had been
committed by girls, the coverage would have focused on why girls, not
kids in general, are acting so violently.

If this is true, it may be because the maleness of violent
criminals is taken for granted. And gender hasn't been entirely ignored:
Newsweek's story, "Why the Young Kill," asked "why the murderers are
Andrews and Dylans rather than Ashleys and Kaitlins."

The answer offered by the likes of Katz and Jhally is simple: it's
the patriarchy. The teen killers, says Beverly McPhail in the Houston
Chronicle, are not abnormal but "well socialized males." Boys are trained
to seek dominance and to use force to get it; those at the bottom of the
macho pecking order, like Harris and Dylan Klebold, may lash out violently.

Rigid sex roles force boys to suppress their emotions, avoid seeking
counseling, and turn distress into aggression. The solution is to retrain
boys to be less competitive and express their feelings.

Undoubtedly, in some peer groups and some families, boys face
extreme and injurious pressure to be tough. Yet obviously, homicidal boys
are a minuscule proportion of male adolescents (whose homicide rates have
been dropping in recent years). In a 1997 Commonwealth Fund study, nearly
80% of boys -- compared to 87% of girls, not much of a gap -- said they
talked to parents, friends, or counselors when they felt stressed or
depressed. The boys from Columbine High who were interviewed on the news
or spoke at memorial services for the slain did not seem emotionally
stunted.

Besides, the expression of feelings, and even mental health
services, may be no panacea for the violent. Klebold and Harris had
apparently verbalized their resentment all too well before the shooting.

Harris had been in psychiatric care and was taking anti-depressants.

Some conservatives offer their own gender analysis of school
shootings: not too much traditional masculinity, but too little. Boys,
they argue, are damaged by a "feminized" environment that denies them a
sense of uniquely male accomplishment and provides few positive outlets for
their natural aggression and competitiveness; thus, they may be driven to
assert their manhood in hideous ways.

But does this make sense?

The
recent tragedies have taken place in fairly traditional communities where
gender neutrality is an unlikely fad and athletics, especially for boys,
are heavily stressed.

True, boys are more likely to feel alienated in school, and efforts
to remedy the largely fictional crisis in girls' self-esteem have often
left male students behind. More must be done to meet boys' educational and
other needs (though the last thing we need in our schools is more
psychobabble about feelings). But to link this alienation to such extreme
horrors as the Littleton tragedy would be a stretch.

The views of scientists who believe males are biologically more
prone to physical aggression cannot be ignored. Still, boys who shoot up
their schools are no more common than girls who drown their newborns in
toilets. (Non-fatal violent crimes by adolescent females have risen
sharply in the last decade; nearly 25% of violent juvenile crime is now
committed by girls, up from 15% in the 1970s.)

Those who depict mass
murderers as normal males gone slightly astray are seeking to caricature
and malign boys under the guise of helping
them.

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